My First Time Standing – And The Horrifying Discovery

For the first time I realized just how absolutely dead and useless my legs truly were.

Legs Like Wooden Blocks

Not everyone will know this, but it is common practice to move a patient in the hospital every couple of hours. This:

• Improves circulation
• Reduces skin breakdown
• Relieves compressed nerves
• Prevents stiffness and cramping
• Reduces the risk of blood clots

However, in my incredibly critical state, most of my nurses didn’t consider “moving me” an option.

• I was on ECMO which has all blood leave my body through a pump
• Dislodging a cannula would bleed me out quickly
• The cannula in my jugular leaked non stop
• I was on heavy blood thinners to assist with ECMO

Laying on an air mattress, a lot of the time I lay in a pool of my own blood as it continuously seeped from the incision in my neck.

To move me meant risking the cannula loosen even more, which would be a quick and bloody end to… well… me.

This left my left leg resting against a pillow between my knee and the safety rail of the hospital bed.

For 24 days…

Who would have guessed that resting against a pillow was still enough pressure to compress a nerve and, ultimately, sever it.

When I woke from my coma and I could speak, I remember telling people that my feet felt like blocks of wood.

• No feeling
• No pain
• No wiggling toes
• Nothing

Just useless things on the end of my legs that I couldn’t feel or move at all.

The Joy And Tragedy Of Standing

Part of recovering in an ICU is to get a patient as vertical as possible. This:

• Increases blood flow to the legs
• Makes the heart work to pump blood against more gravity
• Gets the body used to being more upright

So when the nurses (a team of about 7) came into my room saying they wanted to help me stand up and get to a chair, I was excited.

After all, every little step like this meant I was closer to going home.

They gathered around me and pulled me up to a sitting position, helping me swing my useless legs off the side of the bed.

Then it was time to sit while the world spun in my vision.

Finally, they do a countdown and one of the nurses to my left says “Get your left leg under you.”

I tried but nothing would happen. I looked down confused as he said a little more forcefully “Get your left leg straight under you!”

Still nothing. It was terrifying to realize I had lost control of a limb. He finally grabbed my leg and shoved it vertical to support me better.

On the count of three, this team of nurses helped lever me off the bed to a standing position. I was up!

“Drag your feet toward the chair” said the nurse.

I stood there, completely incapable of moving my legs while these nurses struggled to hold me up. Remember, even with atrophy I was still around 230 lbs.

“Move your feet! Just drag your foot toward the chair!” He was straining now.

Once again, as fear gripped my heart at my inability to move my leg at all, they moved me toward the chair, dragging my useless feet behind me.

They got me into the recliner, frustration obvious on some of their faces, as none of us truly understood how weak and paralyzed I was.

In fact, my legs were so useless that I couldn’t even push myself back into the chair and they had to shift my butt cheeks back (scraping wounds and bed sores and all) to get me situated.

Even then, the pain was so bad that I threatened to purposefully fall in the floor just so they’d have to put me back in the bed.

My Angel Of Mercy

Then, my hero, my Constant, my Felicia. She stepped in, grabbed my arms and pulled me up to a sitting position and grabbed my head to her chest.

And just held me there. They had just given me a shot of an opioid and I was fading fast but she stood there, selflessly, and held me up off of my painful wounds.

It was there, in that chair, that the realization became complete that my feet were dead to me. And my left leg from the knee down.

And this turned into one of the first “nevers” I heard from the doctors after they tested and examined my leg until their hearts were content.

“You’ll probably never be able to use this leg again.”

The story will go on about the brace they made me to hold my foot up, how I had to learn to walk again and more… This was just one moment in a much longer fight. In my book, I share everything — from the day I died to the day I walked again.